Connecticut College News

Connecticut College Art Professor receives Artist Fellowship Grant

07/14/2010

NEW LONDON, Conn. - Connecticut College Art Professor Andrea Wollensak, chair of the Art Department and co-associate director of events for the college´s Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology, has been awarded a $2,500 Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism (CCT) Artist Fellowship Grant in New Media.

The grant is awarded to the state´s finest creative artists to encourage their continuing artistic development. This is the second time Wollensak has received the CCT Artists Fellowship; she was selected on the basis of "artistic merit" from among more than 400 applicants statewide. Wollensak plans to use the grant to fund "Networked Landscape," a series of installations using video, audio and mobile media that explores Iceland´s geographically distinct locations and landscape through the narratives of the country´s residents and highlights the significant shift in cultural meaning of landscape.

"With these stories and their connection to place, I hope to explore how landscape is understood and is shaped by conditions of mobile network culture," Wollensak said of her project. "I also intend to engage the way we apprehend, and are comported by social and virtual networks, focusing not on the descriptive and superficial attachments between people and places but rather on allowing the historical, personal and semantic background behind these attachments to be made expressive and visible." Upon returning from sabbatical in the fall of 2011, Wollensak plans on introducing a new studio course that will incorporate her research and introduce Connecticut College students to creative uses of mapping. A

bout Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism The CCT was created to bring together arts, historic preservation, film and tourism while preserving and promoting the state´s cultural and tourism assets in order to enhance the quality of life and economic vitality of Connecticut.

About Connecticut College Situated on the coast of southern New England, Connecticut College is a highly selective private liberal arts college with 1900 students from all across the country and throughout the world. On the college´s 750-acre arboretum campus overlooking Long Island Sound, students and faculty create a vibrant social, cultural and intellectual community enriched by diverse perspectives. The college, founded in 1911, is known for its unique combination of interdisciplinary studies, international programs, funded internships, student-faculty research and service learning. For more information, visit www.connecticutcollege.edu. --CC--